Field of the Invention
Embodiments in accordance with the present invention relate to a disposable apparatus to track a position, and in particular to track a position of a patient in a hospital.
Description of Related Art
Indoor Real-Time Location (RTL) Systems (RTLS) are popular in the healthcare industry for a variety of applications ranging from asset tracking through patient and staff tracking, environmental or patient sensing (e.g., temperature), hygiene compliance, elopement (i.e., a patient leaving a facility without authorization), theft prevention, and so forth. A need for efficient and affordable patient tracking is important to more efficient and better healthcare.
RTLS systems of the known art rely primarily upon RF transmissions to determine location. The known RTLS may further utilize a secondary technology such as infrared (IR) and/or ultrasound (US) in order to improve spatial resolution relative to RF triangulation based methods. Methods for using secondary technologies are described in numerous places, for example, in the following issued patents: U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,604,909, 8,046,486, and 5,917,425, all of which are incorporated by reference in their entireties. These patents describe RTLS methods that use IR and US as a secondary technology to improve location accuracy.
Technologies of the known art suffer drawbacks when used to try to implement patient tracking. For example, passive RFID tracking is typically limited to either crossing detection (e.g., using an RFID reader surrounding a door to detect when an RFID tag passes through the door), or manual scanning that is typically performed after the patient location is already known. Having additional RFID readers spread around the hospital and not just at doors increases the cost and may expose patients and equipment to relatively high doses of low frequency (LF), electromagnetic radio frequency (RF) fields.
Active RFID tags also are not a desirable solution. Active RFID tags are more expensive than passive RFID tags, which leads to problems in a hospital environment. First, patient tag loss (i.e., attrition) is estimated to be at least 10% a month. This results in turnover of substantially the entire inventory of active RFID patient tags every ten months. Second, conventional active RFID tags are often reused for another patient when the first patient no longer needs the tag. This reuse necessitates an anti-infection regiment that is both costly and must be as close to 100% reliable as possible.
Furthermore, patients typically already wear an identification band, bracelet or the like, which may include an additional barcode that is different than the ID coded into the active RFID tag. The two IDs may not always be assigned to the same patient, e.g., if the active RFID tag is reassigned to a later patient. It is advantageous at least for the sake of patient comfort that an apparatus to implement efficient and affordable patient tracking be able to be incorporated with the identification band, bracelet or the like that the patient may already be wearing.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a simple and unified apparatus and method in order to continuously track patients in hospitals, such that the shortcomings of the current methods as identified above are overcome.